Blitzkrieg

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more random notes for Courtisane Festival / Night Vision program.

Paul Virilio, interview with Chris Dercon, in Impulse, 12 (4), 1986.

“- There is also another reversal, that of day and of night. Is there a link to be made between the day-night relationship and the night bombings of the Second World War and the idea of night as a black hole, in ‘Star Wars’ (the Strategic Defense Initiative)?
– There is much to be said here. It is certain that technological war allowed us to continue to make war at night, in other words, we’re performing theatre. Then, after that, in 1914, 1925, those same projectors were used to pick out the planes coming to bomb in order to shoot them down. So here we have a whole light-war; tracer-bullits wil be used to make night-time shooting possible, and flares to light up the troops’ night chargers (flare revolvers and rifles). And I myself saw those special effects in the Second World War. During the bombings of the city of Nantes I saw those projectors, those tracer-bullets, those rocket-parachutes tossed out of bombers to light up the bombing zone. It was a fabulous show of unheard and even tragic beauty. It was Rome burning. So it’s certain the use of new technologies extended war to the totality of time, not only as in the past wars in summer time, but also war in wintertime. In antiquity was was waged starting in march, and then stopped in September-October. The new technologies have allowed us to wage war year round. But up ntil 1914 no one made war at night, they stopped at nightfall. Now, with the new technologies, not only do they make war all the time, in all seasons, but non-stop, day and night. We have a totalising phenomenon that is also a phenomenon we experience daily with live broadcasts from the four corners of the earth, which allow us to watch a festival or ballgame. there is therefore a cancellation of the daytime.”

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Eduardo Cadava, “Lapsus Imaginis”: The Image in Ruins, October, Vol. 96. (Spring, 2001), pp. 35-60.

“For (Ernst) Jünger, there can be no war without photography. This is why the entirety of his writings on photography suggest the ways in which the German war of light and disaster illuminated the links between photographic technology and the techniques of modern warfare. While the English began equipping their bombers with photographic apparatuses, the German blitz flashed its death across the skies and landscape of Europe. Dividing night into night and day, it illumined the space of war. “What had taken place in the darkroom of Niepce and Daguerre,” Paul Virilio explains, “was now happening in the skies of England.” Indeed, we could even say that the blackout that was enforced during the blitz-the event that, according to historian Philip Ziegler, “impinged most forcibly on the life of the average Londonern-transformed the entirety of London into a kind of gigantic darkroom, into a massively photographic space. Like the camera flash that enables the emergence of an image, the Luftwaffe bombers dropped incendiaries both to trace the bombing area in London and to light up nocturnal targets. London became subject to the glare of explosives and the blinding light of the searchlights whose skyward beams traced a kind of luminous cat’s cradle in the night. To say that there could be no blitz (the word “blitz” was taken from Blitzkrieg, “lightning-war”, sd) without the production of images is to say that there could be no lightning war without the flash of the camera.”

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Joe Banks & Caroline Grigson, Roadside Picnics – Disinformation and Sound Mirrors, 1997

“During the WW2 nocturnal Blackout procedures were tantamount to a policy of compulsory mass hyperacusis. Venturing outdoors at night, particularly the urban population, already hypersensitized by fear, found their hearing heightened still further by immersion in levels of darkness which were unprecedented since the introduction of street-lighting. The basic hypothesis here is that the experience of defensively listening, consciously and unconsciously, for the dull-thud of explosions, the whistle of rockets and bombs and the roar of planes is the mechanism by which such autonomic states encode, at a fundamental neurological level, as conditioned, reflexive responses to ambient low frequency sounds. These high states of arousal are necessarily those in which individuals are most receptive to sense-data. These responses are also culturally transmissible – primarily through the medium of cinema. It is worth noting that extreme sensitivity to sound (of the exact sort idealised by the composer John Cage) is not only a state of heightened esthetic awareness, but also a recognised medical condition, often associated with debilitating phonophobia and the onset of conditioned tinnitus – and during the war advertisements in Picture Post magazine suggest there was a roaring trade in sedatives, not only for people but also for household pets.”

All images: Night bombing patterns (1943)